Vampire Hunter (Darkstalkers) Fan Fiction ❯ Felicia In The Mix ❯ Part 3: Pages 8-10 ( Chapter 3 )

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

[Pages 8–10]

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Friday. I am rather hung over this morning, waking up in a less expensive hotel a block down the street. The phone rings shortly before ten o'clock, as I'm swallowing a few ibuprofen.

"Mornin', Richie."

Felicia? Well, hell, good morning to you. How'd you get this number?

"You gave it to me last night. Well, you gave me your room number and the name of your hotel, so..."

Ah, I see. I don't remember that.

"Myahh, well, we were both pretty wasted by that point," she laughs. "I was thinking – have you eaten yet?"

No, I haven't. Why?

"Well, I was about to have room service send breakfast up here. If you want to come over and have something to eat, we can talk a little more for that article of yours..."

––

About a half-hour later, I'm walking up the front drive of the Hard Rock, my camera hanging from my neck and my satchel of equipment slung over my shoulder; Jon collects me at the entrance and escorts me to the elevators. I ask him, doesn't she live here? What're you doing staying in the hotel?

"Well, the whole process of filming the concert is going to be rather complicated. We decided to stay on site to prepare for the big event – to supervise the proceedings, as it were... She may talk lightly, but I can assure you she's dead serious about this business."

The suite he leads me to is sumptuous but not overly large, befitting its status as merely a temporary base of operations. When we walk in, there are about a dozen people scattered around the place, most of them techs or secretaries of one kind or another. Vincent Truro is flipping through the channels on the big-screen TV; sitting with him on the couch is a red-headed man I don't recognize, introduced to me as Gerry Campbell. I'm told that he's been tapped by Felicia's label to supervise the filming of the concert, and the name strikes a familiar chord – he directed two music videos for Felicia's last album.

The room is equipped with a billiard table, but nobody's playing pool. The table is instead partially covered with a sheet; Felicia is sitting on top of it, wrapped in a fluffy white bathrobe. She sits cross-legged as always, hunched over her breakfast tray, her tail bobbing contentedly behind her. Everyone else in the room is drinking coffee (Jon takes out a hip flask and adds a shot of something to his), but she's having milk, drinking it directly out of the carafe. There are already two empty carafes on the tray.

She's absorbed in finishing a large slab of ham, but her ears perk up when she hears me speaking to Gerry. "Rich! Grab some coffee and pull up a seat!"

I comply, retrieving one of the stools from the wetbar and settling in next to the pool table. So what's cooking this morning? I ask. "Oh, nothin' much. We're probably gonna be here all day, so if you wanna stick around and get a look at how we're setting up, feel free."

Thanks for the offer. Hope you don't mind me bringing my camera along.

"Myahh, that's fine. So where do you wanna start today?"

I take out my minicorder. I'm not sure what to say to that, I reply to her – I forget where exactly we left off last night. Although I was going to ask you one question that we kind of got sidetracked away from: Why Vegas?? What is it about this place, above all others, that calls you to it? From the way you were talking last night, I can only imagine there's more to it than the fact that you were raised here... What makes Las Vegas your home?

She raises one blue eyebrow. "Did your family move a lot when you were a kid?"

Yep. Army brat, me.

"Ah. I guess it might be a little difficult for you to understand, then." She pauses, regarding me with something like pity. "Personally, I don't know how anybody can live the first eighteen years of their life in one place and not get attached to it... Actually, I've kinda got, like, a story about that. You wanna hear it?" Absolutely, I tell her.

She takes a sip of milk (more like a gulp, really) and begins. "Myahh, well, here goes. I didn't get out much when I was a kid, a really young kid I mean; I had a pretty strict curfew. Mom always said I had to be indoors by nine, and I was always indoors by nine, obedient little kitty that I was... But around the time I turned thirteen, I stopped staying indoors, if you know what I mean. My mom and all my aunties always went to bed around ten o'clock, so I'd wait till real late when they were asleep, and then I'd open the window and sneak out. My bedroom was on the bottom floor, so I didn't have to climb down any trellises or anything like that. Just pop out, shut the window behind me – leave it just open enough to get a claw in when I came back – and hop the fence.

"And I'd just go strolling through the neighborhood around the convent, man. I'd do it every night during the summer – that's when it was best, 'cuz I didn't need a coat. Wearing regular clothes always made me friggin' itch – still kinda does," she says, shrugging the bathrobe back off her shoulders. "So on summer nights I'd go out in just my fur, and it'd feel wonderful.

"God, I loved it so much: the stars at night, the big yellow streetlights, the crickets chirping, the good old streets, the feel of the night air on my skin. And I walked those streets and those alleys so much that if you took me back there and dropped me off at some random corner with a blindfold on, I'll bet ya I could still find my way home just by the feel of the pavement under my paws... So I'd go out as far as the park and lay myself down on the grass and watch the sky. I'd lie there, looking up at the moon and the stars, humming little songs to myself, and I'd feel, like, at peace with everything. Sometimes I'd hop up somebody's tree and sit way up on a branch, watching the lights flashing downtown... and I'd get to feeling like the whole town, everything I could see, was mine."

Wait. You were in a public park? Age thirteen, by yourself, in the middle of the night? Seems rather fortunate to me that you didn't get, well...

She nods. "Well, yeah, now I know the risk I was taking. But I've always been pretty friggin' strong for my size – and I've always had these," she smirks, wiggling the fingers of one hand demonstratively, her claws gleaming (her hot-pink claws; it comes to me that she must spend a fortune on nail polish). "And besides–" her ears twitch – "if there was anyone I could always hear 'em coming. I'd find a good shadow to hide in till they were gone. If it was a really desperate situation I'd just turn myself into a cat and walk right on by 'em, and they wouldn't suspect a thing.

"And I kept getting more courageous, started going a little further from home every night. You know, I must've seen every inch of this town west of the Strip by the time I got out of high school. I know this place better than most people know their hometowns. But the thing that called to me was the Strip itself. All those flashing lights, all that neon, all that glory... I kept, like, edging toward it. I'd walk a block further every night.

"Mom used to let me go out trick-or-treating around the neighborhood every Halloween – and I always dressed up as myself, of course, 'cuz – y'know – it was the one day out of the year where I didn't have to shapeshift to fit in... But the year I turned sixteen, October was nice and warm, and I finally got up the nerve to go right out on the Strip. What with all the crazy costumes that people were wearing, I totally fit in – I even got a couple of compliments. I was just skippin' up and down the street all night with a basket full of chocolates in my hand, and my heart pounding like crazy and a big stupid grin on my face... I came back three hours late. My mom stayed up, and she was livid. She's all like, 'Good Lord, girly, it's getting on for one A.M.! Where have you BEEN?!' And like a good little girl, I tell her where I've been. So she just throws up her hands and says, 'Felicia dear, don't do that! I've been worried sick about you!' And I'm like, 'I'm so sorry, Mommy, I didn't think...' And then she wraps her arms around me in a big bearhug and she says, 'It's okay, sweetie. I'm more glad to see you home safe.'

She thinks for a second. "I know to some people Vegas is a horrible place; all they ever look at is the sleaze, and they get all cynical about it, calling it trashy and tacky and perverted and money-sucking and like a million other kinds of crap, but dude – for a kid like me it was my idea of heaven. A place where the lights are bright and colorful, and all the people are walking around all giddy and excited, and there's some new wonderful surprise every five hundred feet. I mean, I loved it because it was my hometown, but suddenly I started loving it even more because it was LAS VEGAS... You know, I've been to Disneyland and all those places, and they're all like nine hundred tons of fun each, but that emotional connection just wasn't there. I don't love this town just because it's some weird-ass fantasy land; I love it 'cuz it's MY weird-ass fantasy land. I know this town, these people, these casinos. They're all mine, in a way nothing else in the world is."

********

The tray is cleared off the pool table when breakfast is finished, but Felicia doesn't budge from her perch. Instead, Jon sets several large rolls of paper before her, and Vince and Gerry are beckoned over; they bring about five other people with them. Laid out flat, the papers turn out to be schematics – the architectural layout of The Joint downstairs. There follows an absorbing discussion on the subject of camera placement; they turn out to have six available. Most artists recording a live show prefer to leave such things to the discretion of the technicians, but Felicia turns out to be very involved in the process; her central concern is that the cameras and their operators not interfere with the view of any spectators. "Sometimes people can't see over the head of the guy in front of them – that's not, like, a thing you can predict or prevent. But somebody not enjoying the show because we put up a camera right in front of his seat, that we can prevent."

Ultimately it's decided to station one camera in the mid-floor mixing booth with Vincent, two in the lower balcony (the VIP seats) where they won't block anyone's view, another on a platform at the far back of the room for wide shots, one in the security pit right in front of the stage, and one in the wings for crowd shots. "You had a good view of the house, didn't you?" says Felicia, turning to me.

Fairly good, but I wasn't exactly onstage with the rest of you.

"Well, we can stick a guy with a camera on stage, can't we?" she asks Gerry.

"What do you mean, put him in the wings or something?"

"That or, like, right on the stage. Just not too obviously – like, we don't want it to be a distraction from the rest of the show."

The group around the table are deep in debate when the room telephone rings. Someone (I hate to think of them as anonymous flunkies, but I've yet to speak on more than general terms with any of them) goes to answer it. "Hello?" he says. There's a pause. "Yes, she's here."

Felicia's ears prick up. "Is it for me? Who is it?"

"Hang on. – May I ask who's calling, please?" Another pause. "He says, just tell her it's Donovan, she'll know who it is."

"You're damn right I do," Felicia replies, in an ugly tone of voice I've never heard her use. It's a shock to see her normally cheerful face abruptly grow flushed with rage. Sullenly, she hops to the floor, shrugging the bathrobe off entirely, and storms across the room to the phone, taking it from the roadie's hand. Without any pleasant preamble, she hisses into the mouthpiece: "All right, how the hell'd you get this number?" She holds the phone up to her ear to listen, then brings it back down to speak again. "Oh, well, whoop-de-doo. I thought I told you I never wanted to speak to you again, not after that mess you got us into last time." She listens again. Her free paw is balled up on her hip, her tail slashing savagely behind her. "Oh yes it was. We walked right into it 'cuz of you... Dude, you almost got me killed. What do you th– Wait, what?... Yeah, it better be an emergency... Well, of course Anita's been 'feeling' something. Goin' around with you, it's a miracle she isn't completely friggin' paranoid by now, poor kid... Right about what?... No, I haven't had time to read the papers... About a week. Why?..."

Her tail and ears shoot straight up in surprise. "They WHAT?! I thought they were never going to – How'd she swing that?" Listening to the reply, she actually growls; she glances anxiously back toward the pool table, gritting her teeth. Her fangs are bared, and for the moment they no longer look the least bit cute. "Oh my god. Good behavior, my friggin' tail... Do they have any idea what's happened to her?... All right, all right, I know now. Keep your friggin' skirt on, dude." She sighs, disgustedly. "Thanks for the warning."

She slams the phone down into its cradle and stalks back over to the table. Her paws are tightly clenched into fists, her shoulders hunched, her entire body practically trembling with anger – as if she was repressing the urge to lash out and hit something. And looking at her petite but muscular frame, I understand that if she were to lash out and hit something, she could probably do a great deal of damage. She told me the other day that I wouldn't like to see her angry; I'm seeing her angry now, and the flash in her eyes makes me profoundly uneasy. "What was that about?" Vincent asks.

Her reply is addressed to the entire table, but it's Jon her eyes are focused on. "Hood's been paroled. Time off for good behavior."

A shock runs through the listeners, for the obvious reasons. She can only mean the infamous Bonnie Hood, a/k/a Baby Bonnie, a/k/a Bulletta: the 'teenage bounty hunter' turned hitwoman who carried out several unsuccessful attempts on the lives of various open paranaturals. Hood was arrested in California the year after Felicia made her big debut, and convicted on multiple charges of battery, assault with a deadly weapon, and attempted murder; the only two reasons she didn't receive a longer sentence were her willingness to testify against those who hired her to try to carry out the various contracts, and certain doubts cast by the defense on her sanity. She should perhaps have remained locked up in San Quentin's women's facility for as much as twenty years; instead, she has just been paroled after seven.

Somebody scrambles for the papers to learn the details. The day before yesterday, we discover, she was released from prison, after the parole board took into her account her seven unbroken years of perfect model-prisoner behavior. Jon scoffs at this, an ugly look creasing his handsome face: "Damned nonsense! She hasn't changed. She only acted the good little girl in front of that lot, because she knew it'd get her out – bloody soft-hearted Californians."

A scoop in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle reveals that Bonnie Hood missed her first meeting with her parole officer, choosing instead to disappear from sight entirely. A dragnet has been thrown across all of central California, although rumor has placed her at a Greyhound station in either San Jose or Santa Barbara.

"Ah, bloody hell," Jon moans, a hand to his forehead. "I'd wager she's going to Arizona."

"Oh my god, you're right!" says Felicia, hurrying back to the phones. "I'm gonna call my sisters and tell 'em to lay low... if they aren't already."

It hits me like a slap in the face: of course, her sisters! Felicia was not the only one of the mysterious catpeople (catwomen, really; no males have ever been found) to appear over the past twenty years. One of them, named Grace, had been managing a life in peace and relative obscurity somewhere in the vicinity of Sedona; Felicia, passing through Arizona on her first tour, met Grace and instantly developed a bond of sisterhood with her. Since then, Felicia's concentrated much of her efforts on finding other orphaned catwomen – and taking them to sanctuary on her "big sister's" farm. She doesn't discuss this often; indeed, we spoke on the subject yesterday afternoon, but very briefly: "I don't wanna bring my world down on their heads," she told me. "At least not until they're ready for it."

Felicia fumbles with the buttons on the phone, her tail waving now more in anxiety than in anger. I look back at Jon and notice the rage in his expression, his hands clenching and unclenching as though he had claws like hers, or wished he did. This is not simply the rage of someone who feels that the paroling of Bonnie Hood is an offense to justice; I can only guess that he must have had dealings with her before. The possibility occurs to me – perhaps Jon himself is a closeted darkstalker. It could certainly explain his odd superstition Felicia mentioned to me the previous afternoon, about never working on full-moon nights. Thanks to Felicia, though, being a paranatural doesn't carry the stigma it used to – if he is one, it mystifies me that someone so close to her, of all people, would choose to keep his true nature a secret. (Or perhaps it's not a secret: if there's anyone who knows for certain whether he's a darkstalker, it'd be Felicia.) Or maybe I'm just making it all up myself; I do have something of an overactive imagination.

The room goes quiet as we listen to the phone conversation. "Hello?... Lucy? Hey, baby, it's me. Is Grace there?... Okay, I'll wait..." A long pause. "Hey, sis... Yeah, I'm fine. What about you guys?... Oh. So you heard the news, huh... Uh huh... Well, that's a relief. What've you got in mind?" Another long pause. "Mm... I guess that's all right. What if there's, like, a way to get around that? Is there anyth– Uh huh..." The tension is leaving her shoulders; her tail's movements no longer suggest anxiety. "Yeah. Well, I'll see what I can do... Uh, maybe I could. Let me think. I've still got a show Saturday, I could leave once we – actually, how's Sunday morning sound? I'll be done by then, for sure." She glances back at us again, and now she's actually smiling. "Well, tell them I'm looking forward to seeing them, too... Okay. I'd better go, Big Sis... I love you too. Bye." She hangs up and emits a loud sigh of relief. "Myahh."

"Everything all right?" Vincent asks.

"Totally," she says, smiling. "Grace says the cops actually called her early this morning, right before the news broke – about B.B. not showing up for parole, I mean. They're watching the place." She turns to Jon. "She said she still wants me to show up, in case anything weird happens. I told her I'd be there as soon as I could once the shows were done with... I was figuring on going home, but now I guess I'm going to Sedona. You up for a drive, hon?"

Jon groans. "Aww, come on!" Felicia says. "We've made that drive before. It's only five hours."

"I know, I know. It's just all those bloody hair-pin turns on that Route 89. I'm not looking forward to those."

Felicia walks up, picks her robe up from the floor, and bends over the sketches and schematics on the table. "So where were we?" she says, and plunges back into the technical discussion, all her worries apparently forgotten for the moment.

(To be continued)